Upgrading 7.04 server -> 7.10

I upgraded my server from 7.04 to 7.10. It went through straightforward.

Prerequisites

• package update_manager_core

If you have not installed it, you can do so:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Installation

Start upgrade with:

sudo do-release-upgrade

I did this over a ssh session. The installation process warns you that you might loose connection during the upgrade and gives you the option to open a secondary ssh session on port 9004.

ssh server -D serverip:9005 -l username

will do the trick.

My upgrade went smoothly. Connection did not fail and after about 30 minutes I had 7.10 installed.

Post installation procedures

VMware Server did not start automatically. I had to install the linux headers manually. The upgrade deleted the old ones without adding new headers. This was due to my installing the server 1.0.4 provided by the vmware.com site, so this is no error in the package upgrade mechanism.

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-generic

Then recompiling all modules:

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

and

/usr/bin/vmware-config-mui.pl

There is an error in the way, the installation procedure sets up access rights to the /var/run/vmware/ directory. httpd.vmware cannot create a httpd directory to store temporary data. I added the following lines to /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware (after the ### END INIT BLIOCK):

RUNDIR="/var/run/vmware/httpd"
OWNER="www-data"
GROUP="www-data"

/usr/bin/test -d "$RUNDIR" || \
/bin/mkdir -p "$RUNDIR" && /bin/chown "$OWNER:$GROUP" "$RUNDIR"

This changes the ownership to www-data, the processes user and group ID. Now one can start the httpd.vmware process that handles the web administrative interface.